In the coming days I told her about the burglary, the photograph of Piazza San Marco, the typewriter. This was during the course of an afternoon outing: we were sitting in a café in Dizengoff Circle that served croissants the size of challas (she said) and coffee in huge cups (“What is it with these cups? Do they want us to wash in them?” she said). I told her. Her face lengthened and tensed at once: she abandoned the coffee, the croissant, everything. As she listened, lengthening and tensing, she raised her finger to a corner of her eye and pulled it down: the sign of a lie, a liar, a barefaced lie. “Nobody broke into his apartment. It’s a pity you gave him your typewriter.” I didn’t understand. “He told Sammy, Sammy knows,” she said. “He organized the whole thing with some friend, to get the insurance money.”
IN THE COMING DAYS
“IN THE COMING days” were words for the continuous present, the knowledge gradually coming into being, not the future understanding locked up in the story of the past. “In the coming days” we didn’t understand what we didn’t understand. We didn’t see what we didn’t see. We couldn’t see what we couldn’t see. The story of life constantly coming into being covered the contours of consciousness, not like a blanket, but like ripples upon ripples, new circles made by the new stone thrown into the water in the midst of the previous circles made by the previous stone.
So “In the coming days” nothing was closed, there was no closure, and the bottom line of the story, all the stories, was the start of a new story, not completely different, but different enough. “In the coming days” made no promises and kept none, especially not fixing an object or a figure in the violent flux of time. In this blurring, in the perpetual coming into being, there was a lot of mercy: in spite of everything it allowed for an open fate, or the illusion of an open fate. “In the coming days” was another sign of open-ended fate and the illusion of open-ended fate that they both, he and she, in their different languages, different ways of managing the world, desired: a mon seul désir, the sole object of my desire.
If that petticoat had still been flying over the red tiled roof of the shack to proclaim its identity, if that petticoat had been the flag of the one identity that was forbidden, if something had been written on the flag of that one forbidden identity, if what was written was a prayer whose words were forbidden, if the petticoat-flag-prayer had existed as an object in the world, then it would have been an aspiration, taken on the amorphous shape of hope pointing in a forbidden direction, so as not to foreclose or interfere with the illusion of open-ended fate, not to stand in its way with an explicit meaning, fixed in time and place: a mon seul désir—to my sole desire.
THE TILED ROOF
IT WASN’T ALL pale red, the roof, but patched with asymmetrical squares of tiles replaced here and there over the years, leaving dark brown-red stains among the faded pink. The mother was tormented by the patchwork of the roof but held back, because changing all the tiles would be a “headache.” Never, it seems, was so much bitterness and resentment and suppressed rage invested in the word “headache” as when it shot out of her mouth in this meaning: an impossible or near-impossible task.
She had two tendencies that were not crystallized into a rigid ideology but remained as a toolbox from which she might have taken out a hammer or a screwdriver: a revolutionary-utopian spirit, which wanted to destroy the old and replace it with the new and perfect; and a reformist-liberal inclination, which aspired to improve and correct, even a little, the existing state of things.
For example, she sewed and hung curtains over the flaps of the tent in the immigrant transit camp where they were housed “when we arrived,” she got hold of a rake somewhere or other and raked the ground: the surroundings of her own tent, and then of other tents. This was a “correction,” which expressed in a profound sense what always outraged her: allowing a temporary and transient state to give free rein to mental and physical neglect, an excuse for letting go. This she found intolerable. In the bundle of aphorisms translated from Hebrew or French that she brought with her (another toolbox), there was one for this, too. “There is white poverty and black poverty,” she would declare with dramatic pathos, and always twice in a row: “white poverty and black poverty.” White poverty was poverty itself, while black was wallowing in it, in the dubious spiritual profits accruing from it, the self-indulgent liberties allowed themselves by those who had been beaten. Together with all this went the deep knowledge that home, the experience of home and the sense of home, were not things granted to elbani-adam, but something that he bestowed on himself, and not only once, but in a process of repeated reinforcement.
That was it — the process: she tore down and moved the walls of the shack as renewed confirmation of belonging, of home. An idea would suddenly sting her in the middle of something, never mind what, and then it wouldn’t let her go; she would make everyone’s life a misery. The moment when an idea would hit her registered on her face with a sudden stare at a wall, a window, a door, and her eyes would glaze, dreaming and scheming at once. “What do you say to moving that wall and opening things up a little”—she would turn to whoever was sitting next to her “at the time” (“he was with me at the time”): Sammy, or Uncle Robert. Which soon turned into “I wouldn’t let him go until he did it”: the hammers, the saws, and the drills were brought, the banging and drilling began, and the rooms and furniture to circle around. The hall turned into the living room, the living room into an enlarged hall with a kitchen, the passage opening once into the kitchen and once into the living room, the wall dividing the kitchen from the little windowless room that remained undefined, once Sammy’s, once Corinne’s, once mine, and once all three of ours, was moved forward and backward — enlarging the room at the expense of the kitchen and the opposite, and the same went for the porch, invading and then retreating from the territory of the kitchen and the entranceway. The ceilings were covered with decorative beams of wood that were removed two years later, after being painted for the third time, and the same went for the wallpaper, which was replaced or stripped off completely, together with the wall-to-wall carpet, which gave way to a straw mat laid on the new ceramic tiles, and the chandeliers (“What did you do to my lustres?”) wandered from room to room and were reattached to the flimsy, sagging ceiling, pulling it down and bumping into tall heads — especially Mermel’s, which was bruised again and again by the heavy chandelier in the living room and its twin in the dining nook.